To understand Weiner, look to Nixon

The Anthony Weiner mess reminded me of my time as a GOP speechwriter during the Bill Clinton scandal — which ultimately pushed me away from conservatism. I still look at questions of privacy and the social-political divide through the Clinton lens — but also through the lens of Richard Nixon.

Nixon’s political life fundamentally altered what we consider appropriate in our political culture: what is off limits, what is private, what is fair game.

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Political analysts are still searching through the Watergate fog. “Nixon suffered the most humiliating privacy loss ever,” Jeffrey Obser wrote in Salon about privacy in the information age, “He was as shocked and confused as we are that a convenient new communications technology — in his case, audiotape — would turn around and tattle on him. And just like us, he reacted by demanding more privacy.”

How can we examine our national obsession with the private lives of public people without looking again at this first president to have his private words paraded before the nation — with all their expletives deleted? I’m not speaking about the Watergate actions here. I’m talking about the social implications: The White House as a glass house.

Americans are still asking how much of a politician’s life should be public. Are there things we need to know? Things we do not need, or want, to know? (Think Monica Lewinsky and the blue dress. Now, think Weiner and Twitter.) How much privacy should people in public life be allowed? Does it matter if a comment is written in a diary, is an off-color joke in a closed meeting or an aside when a microphone is left on?

If it taught us anything, the Lewinsky scandal showed that there are still some private areas of presidential life: In my guise as GOP consultant then, I labored daily in the face of polls showing that Americans disapproved of Clinton’s actions — but did not believe he should be punished in his public capacity.

It frustrated the hell out of us. Conservatives were desperately attempting to politicize the “private,” as feminist thinkers had called on us to do.